Bruce

great narrative. It succeeds in placing you in the perspective of one viewing the events without the benifit of the knowledge of the outcome. And by exuming this sliver of time one understands that it was our finest hour, our 1939 when we stood for the most part alone against the superpower of the world, till all relized how serious and devoted we were to this newly born cause of freedom.

ben hur was really a surprise for me i had thought that it was a story concocted for holywood but then i found out it was written by a civil war general in 1880, the historical narrative was surprisingly rich and replete with cultural details of period giving it a richness i had not suspected from a christian based novel. I had suspected the typical kich christianly cultural dogmatic proclamztion written for the club or condecsendedly written for the heathen, but instead i found a genuinely challenging presentation of the christian story that resonated with my own personal expierience with salvation and the conflict of the hopes and perspectives of the flesh and its own version of glory contracted against the internal recognition and realization of a power and love that renders all to dust in comparison.